Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

By Mark Peel

Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and Melbourne, Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse is a pioneering comparative study that examines how these stories of poverty were narrated and reshaped by ethnic diversity, economic crisis, and war.

Probing the similarities and differences in the ways Americans, Australians, and Britons understood and responded to poverty, Mark Peel draws a picture of social work that is based in the sometimes fraught encounters between the poor and their interpreters. He uses dramatization to bring these encounters to life—joining Miss Cutler and that resurrected horse are Miss Lindstrom and the fried potatoes and Mr. O’Neil and the seductive client—and to give these people a voice. Adding new dimensions to the study of charity and social work, this book is essential to understanding and tackling poverty in the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780226653662

Book preview

MARK PEEL is professor of modern cultural and social history and head of the School of History at the University of Liverpool. A former professor of history at Monash University, he is the author of three books, most recently The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12       1  2  3  4  5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65363-1 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-65363-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65366-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peel, Mark, 1959–

Miss Cutler and the case of the resurrected horse : social work and the story of poverty in America, Australia, and Britain / Mark Peel.

    p. cm.—(Historical studies of urban America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65363-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-65363-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Poor—Services for—United States. 2. Poor—Services for—England. 3. Poor—Services for—Australia. 4. Social case work—United States. 5. Social case work—England. 6. Social case work—Australia. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

HV43.P44 2012

362.5′53—dc22

2011016218

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

MISS CUTLER

     & the Case of the

Resurrected Horse

SOCIAL WORK AND THE STORY OF POVERTY IN AMERICA, AUSTRALIA, AND BRITAIN

MARK PEEL

MISS CUTLER

& the Case of the Resurrected Horse

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

ALSO IN THE SERIES

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin

by Christopher Klemek

I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

by Cynthia Blair

Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City

by Lorrin Thomas

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

by Jordan Stanger-Ross

New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era

by Jennifer Fronc

African American Urban History since World War II

edited by Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter

Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Public Housing in Chicago

by D. Bradford Hunt

Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California

by Charlotte Brooks

The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia

by Guian A. McKee

Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis

by Robert Lewis

The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York

by Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefk owitz Horowitz in association with the American Antiquarian Society

Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940

by Chad Heap

To SCOTT, for everything,

and for my friend LOUISE PERSSE,

who always rather liked Miss Cutler

    Contents

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One MELBOURNE

Case 1: Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse

1   Service, Sympathy, and Efficiency

2   Mr. Smith and the Importance of Modern Casework

3   Wise Discrimination

4   Lady Detectives

5   There Are Those Who Feel Their Position

6   But Most Will Never Better Themselves

7   A Growing Sense of Justice

8   The Citizens’ Welfare

Part Two LONDON

Case 2: Miss Hedges and the Stupid Client

9   The Man with the Repulsive Face

10   We Are at a Crossroads

11   They Are Somewhere Down the Stairs

12   Little People

13   Dense and Low Grade, but Still He Builds Great Castles in the Air

14   Nightmare Days

Part Three BOSTON

Case 3: Miss Wells and the Boy Who Wanted to Be an American

15   Changing Jerzy

16   Closed Mouths and Wise Guys

17   She Has Found Herself, and He Will Make a Good American

18   The Primitive Becoming More and More Dominant

19   More Sinned Against Than Sinning

Part Four MINNEAPOLIS

Case 4: Miss Lindstrom and the Fried Potatoes

20   The Discovery and the Remedy

21   He Is Too Willing for Us to Assume Responsibility

22   His Attitude of Helplessness Is Exasperating

23   An Insecurity of Terrifying Proportions

Part Five OREGON

Case 5: Miss Perry and the Boy Who Knew Numbers

24   Policing Relief

25   Evasive Types and Plausible Women

26   Into the Backwoods

Part Six MEN IN SOCIAL WORK

Case 6: Mr. O’Neill and the Seductive Client

27   In a Woman’s World

28   He Must Be Bent to Our Will and Made into a Man

29   Confronting the Nagger

30   Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Mattner

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Sources

Appendix 2: Cast of Characters

Appendix 3: Case Notes

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

A book that takes years to write, and a research project that began a long time ago, will always generate debts that might now be forgotten. So I shall try and start at the beginning. I first looked at the case files of the Citizen’s Welfare Service in 1994 at the suggestion of Tony Birch, then in History at Melbourne University. I will be forever grateful to him for trusting me with the idea and the inspiration. The first people who heard about the idea were my colleagues at the Urban Research Program at the Australian National University; it might have seemed a diversion, but Patrick Troy, Tim Bonyhady, Alastair Greig, Steven Bourassa, Nicholas Brown, and Max Neutze always encouraged me to pursue it.

To the organizations whose case files are featured in this study, I am exceedingly grateful: Melbourne’s Citizen Welfare Service, London’s Family Welfare Association (especially Helen Dent, chief executive, and Loraine Toone); the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (especially former president David Robinson; Nancy Scannell, director of planning; and Michael Ames, director of research); the Home for Little Wanderers (especially then president Robert Raye); and the Minneapolis Family and Children’s Service (especially the director, Terrence J. Steeno). There would be no archives without archivists, who were to a person generous, knowledgeable, and patient; those overseas were also remarkably welcoming to a long-distance traveler. I especially want to thank the staff at the University of Melbourne’s Special Collections; Elizabeth Mock and Dale Freeman from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Archives and Special Collections; David Klaassen from the Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries; Bridget Howlett and the excellent staff at the London Metropolitan Archives; and Tim Bakke, who did an immense amount to help me at the Oregon State Archives. During my trips to London, Boston, and Minneapolis, I benefited from some very generous people: to Clay and Carolyn McShane in Boston, my undying thanks for a place to stay, great conversations, and Carolyn’s baked beans. Thanks also to David Klaassen for a couple of car trips on some very cold Minneapolis days and for organizing a seminar attended by the great Clarke Chambers; to Pat Thane in London for the seminar, the dinner, and so much good advice; and to Selina Todd, then at Manchester, for the opportunity to visit and speak.

Most of the research and writing for this book took place while I was a member of the Department of History and then the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. I benefited from the interest and advice of a wonderful community of scholars, not least in a school seminar in 2005 that emboldened me to continue writing the dramatizations that are featured in this book. Barbara Caine read much of this manuscript in draft and improved it as only someone of her commanding intellect could. Leah Garrett read my introduction and helped me revise many of the themes of the entire project. I was asked telling questions and given great advice all the way through this project by Monash colleagues—I think especially of Bain Attwood, Graeme Davison, Jane Drakard, David Garrioch, Michael Hau, Peter Howard, Carolyn James, Pauline Nestor, Seamus O’Hanlon, Marian Quartly, and Christina Twomey—and by a host of historians and friends in other places: John Murphy, who generously read drafts and shared his own work in progress; Mike Savage, who also shared some of his own writing prior to publication; and Janet McCalman, who always knows how to make me think more and write better. For her general enthusiasm and good sense, my thanks to Rosemary Johnston, and for always being interested in everything, my thanks to my mother, Jean Peel. I am also grateful for the thoughts and reactions of my many postgraduate students, but especially to Megan Blair and Barbara Russell, who acted a part and taught me a few things; Stephen Powell and Piers Lumley, both of whom did sterling service as research assistants; and Paul Sendziuk, who arranged an invitation to speak in Adelaide. I am also grateful to the Australian Research Council for Large Grant A00103361, which funded the research time and travel necessary to make this a comparative account.

The very last stages of this book were completed in a new location, the School of History at the University of Liverpool. My thanks to Andy Davies, Brigitte Resl, and Dmitri Van Den Bersselaar for helping to refresh a project so long in the making, and to Pat Starkey, Stephen Kenny, and the other participants in a Northwest Historians Network seminar in May 2010 who made me think again about possibilities and connections. I am also very grateful to the three scholars who read this manuscript for the University of Chicago Press for their accurate critiques and suggestions for improvement.

I was able to present papers and seminars on various aspects of this project in all kinds of places, and I am grateful to all of those who asked questions, challenged my approach, and—usually—confirmed that it was worth doing. Particularly important opportunities to share the work were provided by the South Australian and New South Wales Councils of Social Service, the Tasmanian Historical Society, the South Australian State History Conference, the University of Manchester’s Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change, the Lancaster University Dynamics of Memories Group, the Sociology Department at Macquarie University, the University of London’s Institute for Historical Research, the History Council of Victoria, the University of Adelaide Labour Studies Department and the same university’s History Seminar Series, the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, the Museum of Brisbane, and the Simmonds Graduate School of Social Work in Boston.

Parts of the book have appeared before, and I am grateful to the following journals for permission to use the material, more or less revised, as well as for the opportunity to publish the work in the first place: the Journal of Men’s Studies (Male Social Workers and the Anxieties of Women’s Authority: Boston and Minneapolis, 1920–1940, Journal of Men’s Studies 15 [2007]: 282–95); the Australian Historical Association (‘Feeling Your Position’: Charity, Social Work and the Drama of Class in Melbourne, 1920–1940, History Australia 2 [2005]: 83.1–83.15); and the Griffith Review (The Imperfect Bodies of the Poor, Griffith Review 4 [2004]: 83–93).

As it nears its appearance, this book is drawing on the talents, experiences, and wisdom of the people at the University of Chicago Press, and my thanks go especially to Robert Devens for his expert advice and good offices and to Anne Goldberg for answering every question I could think of. I am also grateful to Kathy Swain for improving my words as only great editors can.

All along the journey, books draw on the sustaining power of friendships, and as the dedication shows, this one carries a particular link to a lasting one. I hope that Louise Persse likes the Miss Cutler who has emerged here. It is also important to recognize Orlando and Doris, two cats wise and serene, who listened to the odd difficult passage, clumsy transition, and half-baked idea in the way only cats can listen. Perhaps Oliver and Ruby will develop the same skill. And this book, like anything I do, rests on the solid foundations of a partnership for life. In our more than eleven years, Scott and I have moved in and out of several houses and to a new continent, and we have carried Miss Cutler with us. It is time, I think, that she moved on.

The task of casework is to make the discovery and apply the remedy.

Minneapolis Associated Charities, 1922

They appear to us only at intervals, so that we catch glimpses of their lives as one might see a film through an opening in a curtain.

Charity Organisation Society Council, London, 1924

Our workers seek to know.

Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1927

Most welfare organizations have a story that is worth the telling, a story terse with human interest, and stratified with pathos, dramatic situations and often a vein of humour.

Charity Organisation Society, Melbourne, 1928

Introduction

An apparently resurrected horse and a man accused of lying. A pregnant Londoner who wouldn’t go to the hospital. A boy called Jerzy and a man called George. Children with fried potatoes for lunch. A boy who could do multinumber divisions in his head. A mother accused of a clumsy seduction. All were characters in stories that were, and are, worth the telling. In the thousands of case files produced by inquiry officers, investigators, charity agents, visitors, and social workers, we read about people, lost now to the apparent anonymity of the past, who are trying to say something. What we read is fleeting, uncertain, and sometimes incidental. But it is what we have. If their words and ideas are scattered and torn, perhaps history can mend them and do them justice. After all, if we don’t put words in their mouths, they remain silent. So this is a book about stories, the ones we know and the ones we can—and must—imagine.

This is primarily a history of what the people who encountered the poor during the 1920s and 1930s heard them saying and of how they formed what they heard into dramatized explanations of poverty’s origins and remedies. It is a comparative study of Australians, Americans, and Britons, of people who shared a commitment to tackling poverty, as well as a set of investigative methods they thought would reveal the best solutions. They shared some presumptions and prescriptions, though in some ways their responses to the problem of poverty were intriguingly different. This is an account of what we see through their eyes: the assumptions they made about their own places and times, the evils they wanted to tackle, and the good they thought they could do. It is a history of their convictions and of the ideas that inspired and sometimes failed them.

These visitors and investigators usually assumed that the poor lied and dissembled or did not comprehend the real causes and consequences of their situations. The poor were often thought to be cunning and deceitful. They feigned simplicity or pretended to look for work when all they wanted was to get something for nothing. They went from one agency to another, drawing too deep from the shallow well of charity. They invented stories and pretended that they weren’t responsible. They said that they’d been unlucky or that there was no hope and no help for the common people or the likes of them. Because they were presumed to tell lies and because they were supposed to be hiding things and avoiding responsibility for their own failings, the poor had to be questioned, examined, and visited. Only thorough and rigorous investigation could establish the facts and distinguish true need from deceptive fraud.

For the new kind of professional and mostly female caseworkers who took over much of the conversation with the poor in American, British, and Australian charity and welfare after 1920, it was especially important that clients understood the truth about their poverty and that they felt their position. The poor could not be helped until they had accepted a true diagnosis of their condition and the cure that might end their problems. This usually meant a careful exchange of questions and answers in which workers struggled to unearth secrets and lies. Often with little material and financial aid to give, workers tackled the difficult problem of proving beyond a doubt that an applicant actually deserved help. They probed for details, looked for possible aliases, contacted other agencies for case histories, asked local shopkeepers, and interviewed neighbors. They probed the silences and the omissions and tried to find truth in the applicants’ language. Yet they knew words could be deceptive, especially when they were spun into stories. The choreography was physical as much as verbal: caseworkers evaluated gestures, expressions, dress, and physical surroundings. People could learn how to simulate genuine feeling and could mimic the truly needy. It was delicate and demanding work.

From the testimonies of the poor, and from whatever other evidence they could gather of circumstance and character, these women—and a few men—wrote dramas of negotiation, dispute, and detection, which emerge in the thousands of case files they drafted and amended. Theirs was a form of charitable writing that took very seriously the need to create knowledge for broader publicity and education as well as about the individual case itself.¹ This book is based on those files, produced by eight different agencies in Melbourne, London, Boston, Minneapolis, and Oregon.² The record of encounters with the poor is patchy and depends on where such case files have survived. In a sense, these places appear in this book because someone—a librarian or archivist, an earlier historian, or a prescient social worker who stood against the discarding zeal of the 1950s and 1960s—thought to preserve a large collection of files and make them accessible to the scholars of the present and future. In Melbourne, London, Boston, and Minneapolis, I could also read these files alongside more or less complete records of the administration and policies of the agency, including annual reports, discussions of casework, and, sometimes, publicity material.

These agencies appear in this story not only because of the fortuitous survival of their records, however, but also because of their significance and because they offered some intriguing comparative possibilities. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Charity Organisation Societies of London and Melbourne, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Boston Children’s Aid Society, and the Minneapolis Family Welfare Association were leaders in the transition from an earlier model of charity visiting to professional casework; the files of Oregon’s Child Welfare Commission, Public Welfare Bureau, and Associated Charities provide a glimpse into the sometimes turbulent mix of public and private charity. These were major local and sometimes national institutions during a period of significant transformation. All played an important part in training the first two generations of paid, professional inquiry officers, agents, and investigators who would in time begin to call themselves caseworkers and social workers. All were part of local welfare landscapes in which they were particularly influential as interpreters, dramatizers, and publicists of new forms of charity investigation, casework, and social work, in part because the more humdrum tasks of dealing with the poor were managed by public authorities or by agencies representing other faiths, including the Salvation Army and Catholic and Jewish charities. The agencies in this study were always able to rely on others to help the absolutely destitute and could therefore focus more confidently on judging, policing, and defining the poor. All did a great amount of general welfare work, including the two Boston organizations that were primarily focused on child protection. And because these agencies amassed evidence and made inquiries in all possible directions, their case files and records bristle with letters to and from other organizations, government bodies, reform groups, and professional associations in their own territories and beyond. They wrote to each other, participating in a national and international exchange of ideas. In examining them, we can hear a much broader conversation about poverty.

* * *

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse has three goals. First, it continues a strong scholarly tradition of using social work’s case files to explore how the origins and solutions of social problems such as poverty were understood, dramatized, and enacted, largely between women, during a period when many of those who would shape the social welfare systems of the mid-twentieth century were being trained in, and shaped by, particular forms of investigation and inquiry. Second, it is a comparison of different places at a roughly similar time. It explores how interpretations of poverty—and casework itself—were shaped by local histories and contexts and by the gender of the interpreter. Yet it also emphasizes strong similarities between these dramatizations of poverty, especially an assumption that because poverty’s roots lay first and foremost in the deficiencies of the poor, its solutions would involve transforming or at least controlling the poor. Finally, the book explores the possibility of using case files (and a little imagination) to dramatize and rewrite encounters between the poor and their investigators in ways that restore to history the voices, perspective, and knowledge of poor people themselves.

For interwar investigative social work, and the stories about poverty for which it was the foundation, the case file took on profound importance. It was the hallmark of professional investigation and the guarantee of a just outcome. Each file began with a profile of the applicant, to which the worker added details of home visits and other investigations. The home visit was especially crucial, for it was here, as social casework pioneer Mary Richmond argued, that the client’s whole atmosphere could be revealed.³ Mary Birtwell, a charity visitor in Boston, described the home visit as a study of the entire history, character, and resources of the whole family, a gathering of all the information from every available source, with a view to searching out the real causes of need.⁴ With such aims persisting into the 1920s and 1930s, it is little wonder that some files contained dozens and even hundreds of pages.

Often brimming with impressions, descriptions, documents, and detailed narratives, busy files were a testament to the caseworkers’ professional rigor. They were also produced for audiences. Overseeing officials defaced neat pages with penned exclamations and penciled underlining. Workers produced shortened versions of the most telling cases for executive committees and the increasingly common case conferences. As they wrote up and revised, they added flourishes and dramatic momentum, turning their clients into characters and highlighting the truths about poverty they seemed to convey. In the training, publicizing, and political activity of these agencies, or what one called its propaganda, those stories introduced appeals for donations, made up the evidence in submissions to public inquiries, and appeared in newspapers next to staged photographs of the grateful recipients, the sympathetic women who helped them, and the older men who presided over agency committees and boards.⁵

Before decisions could be made about poverty’s remedies, either in the intimate encounters between caseworkers and their clients or on the larger canvas of political and social debate, poverty’s true causes and characteristics first had to be dramatized and explained. Poverty must always have a story that explains the present and looks into the future. The story can focus on what is wrong with the poor and how they must be saved or transformed. Or it can speak of the larger wrongs that poverty reveals and how those might be put right. Of course, the poor themselves also have a story. For them, it was important to offer explanations that would secure them what they needed, ideally without too much time-consuming and intrusive interrogation and in a way that said something about the burdens they carried and preserved something of their dignity. In this way, case files form an archive of interactions, debates, and competing versions of the truth.⁶ This was sometimes a prolonged war of words and sometimes a brief skirmish, but it was always, as Eileen Yeo recognizes, a fascinating theatre of encounter.⁷

Case files provide us with a stock of stories drawn from life and shaped by their writers toward conclusions and lessons, as they turned what they saw and heard into dramas and melodramas, comedies, and satires. The best stories presented tableaux in a theater of class, with more or less stock characters performing scripts of detection, redemption, and salvation. They captured the dilemmas of proving entitlement, praising the grateful and deserving poor, and condemning the ungrateful graspers who imperiled the whole business of charity. They proved that investigative methods and professional expertise could help the needy, unmask the deceiver, and identify the person who could be transformed as well as the pauper who should only be deterred. Above all, caseworkers claimed to tell the truth about poverty. As Linda Gordon reminds us, case records were not always scrupulously honest, and sometimes a worker needed to note what she ought to have done, not what she did do.⁸ But if we are interested in case files as dramatizations of what was meant to be, as stories written by narrators, that makes the choices they reflect even more significant, especially when some of these stories were used to justify some forms of charity and turn others into pauperization or useless benevolence.⁹

The most telling stories cast an especially interesting light on what their narrators thought others would find convincing and moving. They help us grasp the good that they thought they were doing and for whom it was being done. Such narrative, as Thomas Laqueur points out, aims to make ‘is’ seem, at least for a moment, to imply ‘ought.’¹⁰ And it is important to remember that these stories had a real impact on the poor themselves, both in the determination of individual outcomes and in the shaping of a broader understanding of poverty and inequality.¹¹ These stories had real power. They shaped poor people’s experience, and they shaped other people’s assumptions and convictions. They described, and they prescribed. Above all, they provide a crucial window into what people who were not poor thought was true about those who were.¹²

As a history of how poverty and inequality were explained by stories, this is also a history of how social and economic hierarchies were described and defended. This was not so much a war as a series of inconclusive skirmishes, but it was a struggle all the same. Daniel Walkowitz argues that the professional welfare workers of the first three decades of the twentieth century played a crucial role in the real and symbolic construction of class identity and authority. As they patroled the borders of class, they also dramatized and enacted them.¹³ In Britain, too, class superiority was the crucial factor linking earlier forms of charity and benevolence with the more modern social work.¹⁴ Autobiographies and testimonies make clear that many twentieth-century people learned about the consequences of their class position from their contacts with social workers, child protectors, and charity investigators, as well as police officers, teachers, priests, ministers, missionaries, and welfare nurses.¹⁵ This was especially true for women and children and for men rendered dependent by unemployment, illness, or incapacity. And as they examined and investigated others, social workers also, of course, made and remade themselves. The writer wrote her own life story, as well as her client’s. The dramatizing of these encounters was not just a matter of attracting funding or shaping public perception. It was also a means of satisfying the worker’s own sense of accomplishment and, I argue, creating her own sense of certainty about how the story of poverty should end.

Class distinctions are forged in public arenas, such as in factories and mines or on the political stage. But they are also made in private realms, such as on doorsteps and porches, in kitchens and living rooms, and in the intimate skirmishes between investigators and investigated.¹⁶ Then and now, those conversations focus less on labor, exploitation, and economic justice and more on virtue, vice, character, and morality.¹⁷ They also take place largely between women. Men served as leaders and officials in most of these agencies, and a few young men specialized in fields such as juvenile delinquency or industrial work, in which their gender was considered an advantage in dealing with boys. The dramas they imagined, wrote, and enacted differed in significant ways from those written by their female colleagues. But the daily work of welfare—and the most frequent forms of encounter between classes—was more and more the terrain of professional women. On the other side, too, women made up most of the clients in social work’s dramas; in the United States, no less than in Britain and Australia, working-class wives and mothers tried as far as possible to keep exchanges with outsiders in their own hands. Certainly, in the times and places described in this book, women entered ever more centrally into the encounters between those who were and were not poor.

The dominance of women in everyday investigation does not make them in some way more responsible than men for creating the hierarchies and justifications of inequality. Nor did they necessarily benefit in the same way as men. Certainly, as an emphasis on social reform, amelioration, and welfare increased the range and number of class interactions during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such interactions often became the responsibility of female professionals. Women did—and still do—much of the hardest and most exacting work in the management of class inequalities. Yet this was always an ambivalent and limited authority. As Angela Woollacott argues, women endured a long struggle to establish their authority on competence and rights rather than innate morality; even now at the end of the twentieth century, she says, the ghosts of female moral authority and a belief in women being inherently maternal have not been laid to rest.¹⁸ As Lori Ginzberg notes of America, a conflation of femaleness and morality has always had both conservative and radical implications for professional women.¹⁹ The benefits women derive from professional status are always somewhat fragile; even if middle class and white, as women these professionals never gain the full dividend of their class, racial, and ethnic privileges.

In the agencies represented in this study, female workers still tended to report to—and be supervised by—male secretaries and committees on which men outnumbered women. Even as this became less true by the 1930s, the rise of women into supervisory positions often created new dilemmas. In distinguishing themselves from the friendly visitors and benevolent ladies of an unprofessional past, for instance, these women, Regina Kunzel argues, sometimes tried to de-gender the act of helping and equated professionalism with masculinity.²⁰ Walkowitz describes women adopting the ‘male’ work ethos of the dispassionate expert, even while continuing, with evident discomfort, to defer to her male colleagues and bosses.²¹ In a comparative view, the shift from female benevolence to male expertise seems more complicated, especially because women caseworkers in Melbourne and London seem to have developed another response to the problem of female authority: they created new forms of gender-specific capacity, based on women’s specific contributions to tasks such as detective investigation and case writing. Among American social workers, too, as Karen Tice argues, women often claimed a clear link between a specifically feminized, personal knowledge of clients and social work’s most important means of professional expression: the well-written case file.²² They assumed that they heard more, and listened more effectively, than men.

At the same time, it is important to consider how the relative dominance of women might have mattered to social work and especially its emerging conceptualizations of poverty and inequality. If we can ask how social work helped create certain kinds of professional femininity or female leadership, we can also ask, following historians such as John Cumbler or Steven King, how women’s involvement in charity, welfare, and casework made a real difference to how those movements grew and what they achieved.²³ In each of the cities explored in this book, it is possible to say that women tempered social work and shaped the experience of poor people in a number of ways. For instance, they tended to be more impatient with men, especially those they termed the able-bodied, and to be less forgiving of men’s failings. Women also believed themselves to be better and more patient questioners of children and were more likely to be impressed by poor women’s struggle to keep their houses and children clean. As working women, too, they exhibited a better understanding than men of the importance—and also the very great fragility—of women’s independence, even if they always tended to impress the importance of good housekeeping on their married women clients. If they were advising other and especially younger women, they often emphasized the importance of a skill or a trade and the capacity to care for yourself if need be. It may have been patronizing, and sometimes they assumed too easily that their own lives as working women should be a model for women who had little chance of economic self-sufficiency. But it made rather better sense than insisting, as some of the male visitors did, that for young women, a life of domestic toil and obedience to a husband was a matter of like it or lump it.

Most important, gender mattered in the relationships women workers developed with their clients. It is true, as Elizabeth Lunbeck argues, that women social workers dealt in morals, bandying about terms such as feebleminded, immoral and slovenly on the one hand and intelligent, upright and refined on the other.²⁴ But they did so—at least in part—having at least seen and confronted those they were labeling. Proximity to the poor—and the focus on everyday welfare work rather than policy, politics, and planning—was itself gendered: by and large, women talked to the poor, whereas men talked to each other about poverty. Accordingly, women were much more likely to be in a position to listen to the poor and to recognize and repeat alternative stories about poverty. I argue that some of what the poor said about unfairness, injustice, and unearned disadvantage could make sense to some women in a way it did not to most men. Woollacott argues that her social and welfare workers and policewomen claimed the right to make judgements but also came to view their clientele as having legitimate interests.²⁵ Ellen Ross claims that her London charity women seemed to have chronicled poverty in rather different ways from men, helping to write new and different ‘legends’ . . . that would now include factory girls and worn mothers, domestic interiors rather than street scenes, schoolchildren rather than child beggars. As she argues, women also focused much more attention on aural information and interviews, whereas men often emphasized poverty’s visual surfaces.²⁶ In these works, and in Beverly Stadum’s meticulous study of welfare relationships in Minneapolis, it is also clear that female interpreters of poverty took greater note of family conflicts and the burdens as well as the importance of mothering.

In this book, I show how poverty’s stories were normally constructed in ways that demeaned the poor, casting them as characters in dramas about inadequacy, deceit, and inferiority in which their willingness to accept transforming guidance distinguished the worthy from the unworthy. But I also want to suggest that some of the female caseworkers who listened to poorer women helped reconstruct the story of poverty, inequality, and welfare in the first half of the twentieth century. It wasn’t all or nothing, and much of the work in case files and archives that might challenge or bear out this claim remains to be done. But it reminds us that as women caseworkers grappled with the problems of translating expected practice into practical social work, they could—and sometimes did—begin exploring an alternative story. As Linda Gordon puts it, Individual caseworkers were usually better (though sometimes worse) than the official agency policies they were supposed to follow.²⁷ Our testimonies of poverty were and are largely produced by women who listened to other women. Perhaps poorer women could say things to other women they could not have said to men, even across a boundary of class. This is why case files are so important. In them we see that caseworkers could bear witness to the truths that poor people, and especially poor women, had been speaking all along. Some caseworkers never wavered from their belief in the inferiority, ignorance, and even stupidity of the poor. But in some places and times, in conversations among women, others began to wonder whether what the poor were saying about their poverty might be true after all.

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In its focus on case files (and especially the theater of encounter), the narration and enactment of inequality, and the importance of women, this study draws on the insights of a particularly rich scholarly literature. In the United States, Roy Lubove first emphasized the importance of case-work and the accumulation and interpretation of social evidence. The history of social work and poverty was then transformed by Michael Katz, who was one of the first to draw attention to the fascinating drama of sacrifice and gratitude that case files contained, and by Linda Gordon, whose study of domestic violence in Boston established the importance of case records as a window into the construction of social problems and their remedies.²⁸ Social work continues to attract some of the best North American historians, with case files used to reconstruct the experience of people living in poverty and to examine the nature of welfare work, especially the professionalizing dilemmas of its female workers. The rich vein of writing includes Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson’s pathbreaking edited collection On the Case and Karen Tice’s superb Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women, both published in 1998. Tice showed how case records transformed clients’ biographies into professional representations, and hers was one of the first studies to deal seriously with the narrative choices and genres of social work writing.²⁹ Daniel Walkowitz amplified the crucial links between case writing and class identity, and Elizabeth Lunbeck showed, in her study of American psychiatry, that casework was one among a variety of methods that allowed social workers to imagine that in implementing a police-like investigatory strategy they were acting in the name of science, not morality.³⁰ Records of negotiation have also proved important in reinforcing the claim, made by Lynn Hollen Lees and Bruce Bellingham, among others, that applying for relief was an active, negotiated process in which historians must seek the reconstruction of struggle and accommodation rather than simple imposition.³¹ The imaginative use of case files and other agency records as a window into the negotiations between social workers and clients is also a feature of recent work by Emily Abel and Joan Waugh on New York City and especially by Beverly Stadum on Minneapolis.³²

In British history, Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil and Seth Koven’s Slumming underscored the importance of charity records in the imaginative reconstruction of what Ross called special, carefully orchestrated relationships.³³ In her most recent work, Ross has also reminded us of the importance of narratives of encounter, which take ideas about charity relationships beyond sentimentalized images of female selflessness, satirical ‘lady bountiful’ stereotypes, or social-control simplifications.³⁴ Although Stephen Page’s call for a more detailed use of case files in reconstructing the lives of the poor has been only partly heeded, Pat Starkey has shown how the detailed notes of her amateur social workers in Liverpool and other cities change our sense of how Britons became aware of the problem family.³⁵ This focus on the vocabulary and sites and occasions of class encounter also follows the imaginative lead of Peter Bailey, who was among the first to raise the issues during the 1970s.³⁶

Relatively few Australian welfare historians have used case records; in some agencies, only registers or index cards were used, and others did not preserve or amalgamate the accumulating evidence that created a story. Because the bulk of its case files were preserved, Melbourne’s Charity Organisation Society/Citizen’s Welfare Service has attracted the most attention, including the pioneering work of Shurlee Swain, Tony Birch’s caustic interrogation of social workers’ interventions in working-class family life, and Nell Musgrove’s illuminating analysis of welfare surveillance in the 1940s and 1950s.³⁷ Here, too, case files tend to tell a more complicated story than accounts relying largely on publications, pamphlets, and propaganda, most especially by uncovering the war of words and putting clients back into encounters in which neither they nor the social worker held all the cards.

The agencies that appear in this study all practiced and fostered investigative casework, and all played a crucial role in the development of welfare ideas and practices in their respective societies. Accordingly, and as the chapters that follow show, accounts of their relationships with the poor can draw on numerous broader histories of charity, welfare, and social work. On the broadest canvas are studies that trace the emergence of case-work on a national scale, including Stanley Wenocur and Michael Reisch’s From Charity to Enterprise.³⁸ Another group—such as Eric Schneider’s